


smoking and drinking and wrecking things

by impertinences



Category: Tombstone (1993)
Genre: F/M, Gambling, Rough Sex, Threesome - F/M/M, Voyeurism, Western
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-02
Updated: 2017-08-02
Packaged: 2018-12-10 01:53:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11681541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/impertinences/pseuds/impertinences
Summary: Each of them is surrounded by rumor.They intersect like wild rivers.





	smoking and drinking and wrecking things

… Bless  
our little hearts,  
smoking and drinking,  
and wrecking things.  
Bless our shameless shame.   
\- Melissa Stein 

 

EACH OF them is surrounded by rumor. 

Kate’s a thorn of a woman, and all the men from Arizona to Texas have wagged their tongues about her, spreading her name like endless sand across the desert. She’s just another grain though; Doc’s infamy overshadows hers. The dentist turned gunslinger. The gambling man with the red-tinged cough and heavy eyes. She smelled him sloping towards dry air with an ache and emptiness in his chest. Ringo is an abscess, a rumor thick as heart blood and dark as thunder. Deadliest man with a pistol. Crack shot with a rifle. Something wrong in them all. 

They intersect like wild rivers and put rumors to the test. 

When Ringo reaches for his pistol, he’s quick as sin. His Colt .45 blurs in the air (Doc doesn’t blink when he points the barrel at his face, not the first time, or the second). The onlookers hoot and holler, whistling their approval, and Wyatt trips his silver coin between his knuckles, feigning nonchalance. Ringo holsters the gun as smoothly as he withdrew it. Doc is hard to best. He spins his silver cup in mimicry, and Kate smirks the entire time. Both men, she notices, have long fingers. Skilled fingers. Fingers capable of killing. (She could pick them both from a crowd, she realizes later, their lanky strength, their dark heads, their violent tendencies.) She understands the tension in the air.

Doc feels Kate’s eyes and her light touch on his shoulder, but he keeps his gaze on the cowboy in front of him. 

Ringo doesn’t look away until Curly Bill pulls on his arm. 

None of them leave unimpressed. 

 

 

THE FIRST time Kate openly kisses Doc in the saloon, Doc tastes like tobacco and the hint of blood – a rusted copper taste on the tip of her tongue. 

He’s eight whiskeys deep, pockets full of cash from five good hands of poker, and fingers slick on the piano keys. She presses her back to his first, swaying with the nocturne’s somber melody, a bottle of bourbon hanging between her thighs from her gloved fingers. She can feel the fever-heat on him, smell the sweat on his brow. (He’s a sick man, but he’s still hers, and she’s memorized all the signals his body can send.) She starts at his neck, rolling her head back against his shoulders before twisting herself around entirely. Doc’s fingers are stubborn, persistent, continuing with the melody even as he shifts on the piano bench to adjust to her new position beside him. Her fingers on his thigh. Close to his gun. Close to his cock. She kisses above his damp collar, where his pulse is weakest, leaving a smear of lipstick as red as cherries across his skin. She kisses the spot where jaw meets neck, below his left ear. 

“If I didn’t know better, darlin’,” Doc slurs, voice thick as Georgian molasses, “I’d say you’re tryin’ to distract me. How unladylike of you.”

Kate smiles slowly against his skin. She squeezes his leg. 

Doc lifts one hand from the piano but continues playing with the other. The song sounds chopped in half. He tugs on the bright decorative bows at her hip, right where her skirt meets bodice. 

When she dips her head against his temple, he turns her face to hers. She’s the one to kiss him. He keeps his eyes half-open, as if in surprise, and Kate can taste the amusement on his lips. She opens her mouth to him, wider, but she kisses slowly, her tongue tentative against his chapped bottom lip, her hand still squeezing his thigh.

She kisses Doc to claim him, to swallow a bit of his sickness into herself. (Kate can be fearless too. She wants him to know.)

She doesn’t realize Ringo watching, eyes wild behind the smoke of his cigarette. 

She doesn’t see him at all, but Doc does. 

 

 

THE MAN on stage recites Shakespeare. Kate only understands a few of the words. She fans herself and orders another tequila. 

Doc unbuttons the cuffs of his sleeves. He rolls his shirt up to his elbows slowly. There’s less sweat on his brow now that the temperature has started to drop, and he doesn’t start coughing even when the Bird Cage begins filling with smoke. The Earps have been in Tombstone a few weeks; Kate knows the change in Doc is mostly mental, a side effect of Wyatt’s stiff expressions and his moral proximity, but she’s grateful anyway. 

He sits beside her in their private box, an arm thrown over the back of her chair, and leans in occasionally to whisper against her ear. “Macbeth was a King, darlin’,” he says. “Murder, civil war, men with too much ambition. That sort o’ thing.” 

“If I recall,” Wyatt interjects, leaning a bit into Kate’s space, “wasn’t it Lady Macbeth with the ambition?”

“Ain’t too many women like that,” Kate says with a grin. 

“Don’t give our maidens here any ideas, Wyatt.” 

Mattie huffs, a sound somewhere between a laugh and a scold, but Kate winks at her, looking for camaraderie in the pale-haired, weak-eyed woman on Wyatt’s left. Mattie smiles back but it’s mostly hidden behind her rapidly moving fan. She isn’t paying much attention to their conversation, to the banter traveling from mouth to mouth. She’s quiet, fervid in the way she bounces her ankle beneath her grey dress, one of her hands twisting the braided strap of her purse. 

Kate knows that look. She’s seen it in Doc before – when he’s hungry to draw his pistol, when he’s thirsty for another bottle of bourbon, when he’s coughed blood into his handkerchief then promptly lit a cigarette. 

It’s the look wild animals get sometimes. She’s seen coyotes with the same hunger in their eyes.

She sees it on Ringo’s face when the cowboys holler and shoot their guns, blasting bits of plaster from the ceiling, scaring the actors off the stage. Their red sashes blaze brightly against their hips, as bright and daring as their bravado. Only Ringo’s face is cool, his lips twitching after he tosses back another whiskey. He doesn’t demand attention like his brothers. He is black smoke and dark eyes. 

When she glances at Doc, she finds him looking again. 

 

 

DOC IS thinner than he’s ever been before. His clothes hide the fact, but Kate sees how his ribs have started to battle with his waist, how all the prominent bones in his body are sharpening themselves against his skin. His sweat tastes like sickness. She licks it off him anyway, straddling his body on a bed in an upstairs room at the saloon. She has her hair half un-pinned, the red curls heavy on one shoulder, her corset untied at the top, her underskirts pushed up against her hips. 

It’s a lot like she looked the first time he’d fucked her at the brothel in Texas. He’s the only element that’s different – the coughs he tries suppressing rattling like skeletons inside of his chest, the wiry length of his body a burning iron against her thighs, his voice a snake’s rasp of southern tones as he undoes her lace bindings loop by loop, exposing more and more of her breasts. 

“You’re a bettin’ woman, aren’t you, dear?” 

Kate raises an eyebrow, bending to stretch the length of her body against him, her corset scratching his chest. “You’re the gambler here, man of mine.”

“This is true, but if the stakes were right. Would you have the sand?”

The stakes are never good enough – that’s what her years at Doc’s side have taught her. They aren’t worth the trouble of winning. There’s too many variables, too many fingers on unseen triggers, too many men itching for a chance to spill blood. The only way to win for sure is to rig the game or take the house, and there’s danger then too. 

But courage has never been her problem. She’s greedy enough to be brave. 

She tells him as much when she slips her hand between their bodies, palming the length of him until he hardens against her, and drags her teeth against his pale throat. 

 

 

KATE KNOWS violent men. She’s known them her entire life. 

Her body used to flinch away from them, long before she hardened herself, before she realized the value in earning a few coins for the gash between her thighs. She grew up quick once she accepted the way of the world. She grew up strong, eyes sharpening like daggers, her accent adding a hint of the devil to her syllables. She took one look at Doc in a Texas saloon and sealed her fate with a slow pour of gin and a passing of a cigarette. His Hungarian shadow, the whore with the sloe eyes and the greedy grin.

She’s not sure if she’s ever recovered from him, if he tore her apart and stitched her back in an aimless way. 

Ringo looks at her as though he’d like to rip those stitches. A corner of his mouth flicks up into a smirk when he spreads his cards in front of him, and she suppresses a shiver. He’s a violent man too.

“You gonna play that hand, lunger, or what?”

Doc drums his fingers against the poker table. “That depends.”

“On?”

“On if you’re willin’ to lose.”

Ringo sneers, the expression ugly and full of heat. “I don’t ever lose.”

“Now, dear,” Doc says to Kate, his style didactic, “I do believe Johnny here is implyin’ a threat. Unless my ears deceive me.”

“Fuck you know, Holliday? Can’t even sit straight.”

Doc smiles and shows his hand. A royal flush. It’s Kate that sweeps her arm across the winnings, flashing her eyes at Ringo. 

He’s angry, but he keeps playing, round after round, until the game itself becomes a test and a challenge. Until most of the men stumble their way back into the streets and it’s the three of them around the table, two men and a woman in lace, the remainder of the bar made stupid with drink. Even the singer’s retired for the night, the loss of her voice and the piano thickening the silence around them. 

Ringo plays until his fingers burn, until the sweat dampens his collar, and the drink turns his veins to sludge. He clenches his jaw when he continues to lose. His teeth dull and grinding. The game was never intended to be his, but he can’t seem to accept his fate. His anger simmers in his gut, coming out through his pores. Doc slicks his fingers across his mustache and shuffles the deck, coughing behind his cigarette. 

The tension at the table could be cut with a knife. 

Maybe that’s what Kate should have done – maybe she should have broken the bottle of bourbon Doc’s been sipping from all night and smashed it so the edges were sharp, sharp enough to slice Ringo’s neck – to quell the strain. But Ringo isn’t scared of dying. He hasn’t been living for anything anyway. He has the look of famine about him though, and Kate can recognize hunger. So when Ringo slides his hand to his hip, his fingers close to drawing the pistol there, Kate leans across the table and kisses him. She grabs the black bandana around his neck, using it as an anchor.

He hesitates. For a moment. Then she can feel the scratch of hair above his lip and the clash of his teeth against her mouth. 

Doc grins. “Ain’t she the sinner?” he asks in a slur, running a hand down her spine. 

 

 

DOC’S EYES are glaciers, a blue bright and cold. Slivers of ice. She feels them following her the entire time she stumbles up the stairs of the saloon with Ringo, feral at her mouth, his hands clutching her like she’s something to own. He either doesn’t mind Doc following or he wants him to – he wants Doc to see all the ways he can take. 

He doesn’t know. 

She isn’t really for sale anymore. 

 

 

“COME HERE,” Ringo says after Doc has closed the door behind him and leaned his gaunt body against it. 

Kate is unpinning her hair, letting the curls fall fully down her shoulders. She’s stripping the gloves from her arms. “Say it nicer.”

“No.”

It’s Doc that laughs, the noise like a rumble of rocks. Kate smiles her fox smile – she understands. Ringo wants her to stand her ground, so he can pull and push her as he sees fit, until he’s backed her into a corner of his making and she’s nothing but claws and spit. He wants what is about to happen to be rough and demanding. Like a bone breaking, he wants it to hurt, and for Kate to want it too. 

She unclasps the pearls around her neck in silence, lets them slither out of her palm. Ringo shrugs out of his worn jacket, the movement quick, full of urgency. His hands go to the holster over his shoulders, and he hesitates. 

Doc calls his bluff and removes his own guns first. He hangs them on a nearby chair then unbuttons his vest. He still looks amused, like he’s the only one understanding the punchline, the joke private. 

Nobody moves. 

“Say when,” Doc drawls. 

The jab lands where its intended. Ringo moves quickly, his strides surprisingly smooth for how much he drank earlier, until he has Kate by the arm. She slaps him twice in rapid succession across his cruel mouth, her hand like porcelain, clean and cold. It’s Ringo’s turn to laugh. He pulls her to him, catching her mouth and tangling his free hand against the back of her neck. 

Doc told her once that some men are only looking for revenge. That’s how Ringo kisses. Like it’s payback for his birth. She doesn’t mind it; she’s been the receptacle for savagery before. She doesn’t feel like he’s taking anything she isn’t giving, but she’s a decent actress. She winces against his mouth and her hands flutter at his shoulders, her nails pinpoints against the wrinkled fabric of his shirt. 

Everything about Ringo is familiar. He drags his hand down her arm, over her coarse skirt, fisting a bunch of the fabric. He’s thin and sharp. She can feel his bones beneath his skin as she pulls his shirt up and tackles the buttons her fingers meet. His bottom lip is chapped; she catches it between her teeth. 

From the corner, Doc’s mouth twitches into a smirk. 

 

 

DOC LIKES to watch. Maybe it’s because he knows he doesn’t have much time left on this earth, his body rotting from the inside out, so he spends his days committing things to memory. The feel of sand beneath his fingers. The slice of the barber’s blade across his jaw. Kate’s mouth, hot and eager, against his. 

He sits like a gentleman, like a wolf in fine clothing, on the chair with his guns and strokes himself as Ringo fucks her. 

She has her legs wrapped around his brittle hips. He has a hand at her throat, pinning her to the cheap bed, his hair dark with sweat and his mouth turned up into a sneer. Her corset is untied but still clinging to her ribs, her skirt bunched up and out of the way, the fabric rustling beneath them and scratching her skin. He reaches between them occasionally to pinch a nipple, so hard that she finds herself gasping into the pain. His hips pump a ferocious rhythm and her thighs tremble against him. 

Kate runs her nails down his neck, over the backs of his shoulders. He’s marked and scarred from a hardened life – most of it by his own choosing. She doesn’t feel sympathy when her fingers bump old bullet holes. She presses into the old wounds, hoping there’s a lingering of phantom pain. 

Ringo doesn’t care about her own pleasure. He brings his hands to her hips and pushes her further down, making her take the brunt of his weight, the slicing of his hips leaving bruises. He meets Doc’s gaze and holds it. 

The men come like that, Doc spilling into his slick fist, Ringo rutting between her thighs like a dog. 

After, Ringo reaches for his guns first, sliding the holster up over his undone shirt before picking his jacket off the floor. His hair falls forward into his eyes. 

He doesn’t look at either of them. 

 

 

IT'S A losing hand, the one they dealt him.

Nobody says anything – they never talk about it – but Doc sees Ringo over the smoke of the saloon and grins his easy grin knowingly. Kate keeps at Doc’s side, her own expression a mirror of his. 

Doc will ask Ringo to play for blood, and Ringo will understand. 

It’s just another round of the same game.


End file.
